Since the beginning of railroad travel, there have been people hitching a ride on freight trains. This lifestyle reached a peak during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when thousands of unemployed men traveled around the country looking for work. We called them hobos. You may have read about the graffiti they left for each other at railroad stops, cryptic symbols that conveyed information such as how welcoming a town was, whether work was available, and who was likely to give a man a meal.

The truth is, however, that men who spent decades riding the rails are unfamiliar with such a code. People who tell of the hobo code know because they read it somewhere, probably in a newspaper, in which pictures of the code were known to be staged. The one hobo who actually wrote about it was most likely trolling. It's true that hobos left graffiti, but it was for a completely different reason, which you can read about at Atlas Obscura.

For some time now, we've been referring to the history of cinema as a century, but that's not quite accurate anymore. It's more than a century and a quarter at this point. This restored and colorized sequence was filmed in 1896. It features Pope Leo XIII, the first pope to ever appear in a motion picture (and who was also noted for his preferred wine). Leo was born in 1810, during the reigns of Napoleon and King George III, and was 86 years old when the film was shot. It is thought that this makes him the earliest-born person to ever appear in a motion picture. If anyone was born before 1810 and can be seen in moving pictures, I'd like to see them. Meanwhile, enjoy a blessing from the pope, 125 years after the fact.

What makes a good song good? It may sound like a silly question, since everyone has their own tastes, but there are some songs that become worldwide hits, and some songs that stick around decades after their time. They must have something in common.

Scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark looked at Spotify to see what people listen to throughout the day. They found that the type of music preferred varies over a 24-hour cycle, and certain types of music tend to please people in different blocks of the day. These blocks were divided into morning, afternoon, evening, night, and late night/early morning (in radio, those are called dayparts). They found that slower songs are preferred in the morning, faster tunes in the afternoon, and dance music in the evening.

So what song has the features that would make it popular in all parts of the day? "Every Breath You Take" by the Police. The 1983 hit is not extreme in any of the audio features studied, and many consider it bland, but it works in any part of the day. Whether that makes it "good" is a different question altogether. Most musicians would rather produce a song that people love part of the day than a song that is acceptible around the clock.

The original paper did not mention lyrics or a song's subject matter in the audio features studied. The audio features were divided and ranked by artificial intelligence. Read more about the research at NPR.  -via Damn Interesting

In Europe, cars are a luxury because most people can get by without one. In the US, automobiles are a fact of life because everything is relatively far away. Therefore, cars in America are heavily regulated, as are traffic laws and even parking spaces.

That's not quite the case in the town of Conegliano in Italy. Angelo Fregolent used a 1962 Lancia Fulvia to bring newspapers to his newsstand, until he retired in 1974. He didn't need the car anymore, so he left it where it was. And it stayed there for 47 years, without tickets or towing because it didn't bother anyone. The car became a local legend, enshrined in Google Street View and many selfies. That is, until recently when the city decided to eliminate street parking in order to widen the traffic lanes. What would happen to the beloved Lancia?

The car was towed, but thanks to public outcry, it will not be junked. In fact, there's an elaborate plan to celebrate the classic car that you can read about at The Drive.  -via Digg

The internet is an amazing tool. If you encounter an annoying problem of any kind, and post about it, you will soon find that others share the same annoyance all over the world. Pretty soon, you have enough content for a gallery, no matter how niche the subject may be. That's the story of McSengets, an Instagram account that documents McDonald's food served just plain wrong. The account originated in Singapore, using the Malay word senget, which means tilted. Founder Ben Chia tells Vice how he and his friends noticed the screwy way McDonald's served their sandwiches, which took the joy out of eating.

“We just get very annoyed [that] when we order Filet-O-Fish—specifically Filet-O-Fish—it tends to be senget. It tends to be off,” Chia said.

The petty problem proved to be a major inconvenience, Chia explained, because unlike other McDonald’s sandwiches, the Filet-O-Fish sports what appear to be softer steamed buns. This means that when one tries to reassemble the misaligned sandwich, the melted cheese tends to tear the bread apart.   

As someone who doesn't like fish and rarely ever goes to McDonald's, yet still gets a Filet-o-Fish craving a couple of times a year, I can confirm that this happens all over the world. But the Instagram gallery isn't limited to fish, because tragedy happens with all kinds of MCDonald's offerings. Here's someone who ordered a Deluxe Breakfast and requested them to add cheese. You might expect them to put the cheese on the bread or the sausage, but this piece end up mostly on the pancakes.



 -via Digg

We are so used to computer-generated special effects in movies that we sometimes forget how difficult and ingenious old-school practical effects were. Terminator 2: Judgment Day came out 30 years ago. Recall when gunshots were fired at the T-1000 terminator, which was made of an intelligent liquid metal. Bullets wouldn't stop him, they just made a metallic "splash" on his surface. That wasn't CGI at all! Instead, those were foam rubber and metal splashes that burst from the actor's clothing, created by master effects artist Stan Winston. You can see that they worked well in the test footage here, shared by the Stan Winston School of Character Arts.

Learn how Winston and his team designed and built this effect at Hackaday. -via Damn Interesting
 
Bonus: Here is test footage of the later effect in which the T-1000's head gets blown in half.

He recovered rather well from that one, too.

John Dee and his son Arthur Dee were 16th- and 17th-century alchemists. In 2018, Megan Piorko found some odd things in one of Arthur Dees' notebooks in the archives of the British Library. There were several pages written in code, upside-down. Considering Dee's subject matter, this must be his most important discoveries, or maybe formulas he wanted to keep secret.  

Could this code be solved? Piorko spent quite a bit of time trying to find the encryption key, which involved a lot of historical research for 17th-century coding practices. Ultimately, she presented the problem to the 2021 virtual HistoCrypt conference. Plenty of amateur cryptologists wanted to try it. Mathematician and noted cryptologist Richard Bean figured it out through a painfully convoluted process.

The encoded passages are Dee's "Philosopher's Stone," or a recipe for the elixir of life, which will be presented in a scientific paper some time in the future. Meanwhile, read about the process of getting a hundreds-of-years-old Latin scientific secret code decrypted at Atlas Obscura.

The Slow Mo Guys made a fire tornado in 2015 and rainbow colored flames in 2016. Now Gavin Free has combined the two experiments and recorded a burning rainbow tornado on their 1000-fps camera to give us a real good look at it.

The colors are made by burning different chemicals, and the tornado is thanks to 14 fans aimed obliquely at the fire. The surprise comes when the different burning chemicals express their colors at different flame heights, instead of colors just twisting around each other. It just looks neat! -via Laughing Squid

In case you're wondering where Free's usual partner Dan Gruchy is, they were separated by the pandemic. The videos are normally recorded at Dan's home in Texas, but this one comes from Gav's home in Britain. With travel restrictions easing, we hope to see the two Slow Mo Guys together again soon. See some of their previous videos.

The holiday we celebrate as Thanksgiving did not originate with the Pilgrims, nor was it celebrated consistently since then. A day set aside in gratitude for a bountiful harvest occurred in the US sporadically, but was often used to give thanks for battlefield successes as well. It wasn't celebrated nationally until after the Revolutionary War, and only consistently since the Civil War. And there are plenty of other countries that have festivals and celebrations revolving around giving thanks. But somewhere along the way, we settled on the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock as the model for America's "first Thanksgiving," and have used their celebration feast, which was relatively well-documented, as the inspiration for ours.  

The feast can be described as a showcase of American food. Turkey, cranberries, pumpkins, corn, and potatoes are New World foods, but the Pilgrims were European newcomers in Massachusetts, and didn't have all of those things available. They also didn't have flour, sugar, or ovens. And in the year 1621, they had very few woman to prepare elaborate dishes. This means quite a disconnect between the Pilgrim's Thanksgiving dinner and what we traditionally serve today. Not that there's anything wrong with our traditional dishes, but they aren't what the Pilgrims ate, which is explained in detail at Mental Floss.

Mark Zuckerberg has been the butt of plenty of jokes since he changed the name of Facebook to Meta, in order to roll out other products such as virtual reality. He introduced the Metaverse in a characteristically stilted video, which was even weirder considering the scrutiny Facebook is currently facing in the wake of the company's internal shenanigans. The marketing organization Inspired by Iceland took the opportunity to poke fun at Zuckerberg's announcement by introducing the Icelandverse. As long as we're making up universes, it's good to get in on the ground floor.

But the video is more than just a parody. Iceland has suffered from lack of tourism during the pandemic, even though they've not suffered from COVID-19 as much as other nations. Now that vaccinated tourists can travel again, they really want you to come and see their lovely landscapes, hot springs, geysers, waterfalls, and horses that you can glimpse in the video. -via Gizmodo

In Alaska's Denali National Park sits North America's tallest mountain, Denali (formerly Mt. McKinley). About three vertical miles below the summit, you'll find the upper reaches of Ruth Glacier. A gorge in the middle of Ruth Glacier is called Don Sheldon Amphitheater. There is no theater, rather, the circle of mountains around the wide plane makes it a natural amphitheater. It was named for Donald Sheldon, a pioneering Alaska bush pilot who specialized in glacier landings. His descendants own a swath of the amphitheater, and in 2018, they built a hotel. Sheldon Chalet is considered the most remote hotel in the world, in the middle of glacier in Denali, and only accessible by helicopter.



Sheldon Chalet can accommodate up to ten guests at a time, offering luxurious accommodations and dining, plus skiing, hiking, rappeling, and fishing. At night, you may be lucky enough to see the Aurora borealis.



A minimum three-night stay for two costs $35,000, which includes the round-trip helicopter ride. But honestly, imagine the cost of flying all the building materials into the amphitheater by helicopter to get the hotel built. Oh yeah, and flying up the staff and supplies, which we assume includes plenty of heating fuel. Read more about Sheldon Chalet at Oddity Central. -via Strange Company  

In the latest installment of their Honest Ads series, Cracked examines the depths of the online dating industry. Warning: this video contains adult subject matter and adult language. In other words, it's all about sex. And disappointment. And gambling. See, online dating apps are a far cry from the matchmakers of old. While you may be looking for a soul mate, the vast majority of people you encounter will be looking for sex. And it's even worse to find that they are looking for sex from someone other than you.

Oh sure, there are occasional happy endings, but you gotta take your chances to get there.  -via Digg

If you're of a certain age, you'll recall the heady days of the early World Wide Web in the 1990s, and the excitement of discovering that a person with very little programming knowledge can build their own website, free, through the web hosting platform Geocities! If you're not of a certain age, you look at the sites that were built back then and say, "What were they thinking?"

What they were thinking was how much fun it was to build your own internet site and fill it with colorful moving images, links, and even a musical soundtrack. The opportunity for everyday folks to build something personal on the internet was much bigger than having a purpose for their website. And it was more important than tasteful design. You gotta work with what you have. If you feel nostalgic for the days of Geocities, you can scroll through Cameron's World to see the range of colors, icons, designs, gifs, and special effects. Many of the pictures and icons are links to archived versions of the original Geocities website it was found on. Host Cameron Askin calls it "a tribute to the lost days of unrefined self-expression on the internet." Geocities folded because they weren't making any money, but the aesthetic lives on as a piece of internet history.   

Almost every country that's a destination for immigrants has procedures in place to make sure you're fit for residence there. They're not going to let you live there without knowing a bit about the country first. These guys know an awful lot about Germany for Irishmen, so you know right off that they'll be allowed to stay. The most important thing to keep in mind is that Germans have a serious sense of humor; it's just hard for Americans to detect it without context. This is the latest skit from the comedy troupe Foil Arms and Hog. -via reddit

At the turn of the 20th century, Chinese food was quite popular in Chicago. However, the Chinese immigrants who moved inland to Chicago started restaurants on a shoestring, and many were little more than stalls, called "chop suey joints." Chin Foin went a different route. He went after upscale white diners who went to theaters and the opera. His first restaurant, King Yen Lo, was above a saloon, but it had white tablecloths, an open kitchen to display its cleanliness, and even an orchestra. Chin opened a second restaurant, King Joy Lo, and then a third, the Mandarin Inn near the opera house. The Mandarin Inn had a large menu of Chinese-American dishes, Western dishes, and an extensive wine and liquor list.

Chin Foin played host every night wearing a tuxedo. His restaurants' recipes inspired the first Chinese-American cookbook in English. He became famous in Chicago, and quite wealthy, but still ran up against discrimination and laws designed to restrict the Chinese restaurant business. Chin also had to deal with the Chinese tongs of the day. He was not yet 50 when he died in a tragic event that the police ruled an accident, but is rumored to have been a murder. Read the story of Chin Foin at Atlas Obscura.

(Image source: the Chinese American Museum of Chicago)